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Submitted on 25 Sep 2016
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Organisation and formal activism: insights from theanarchist tradition
Federico Ferretti
To cite this version:Federico Ferretti. Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition . In-ternational Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Emerald, 2016, �10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127�.�hal-01371300�
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition
Federico Ferretti
Abstract
Elisée Reclus (1830-1905) argued that ‘anarchy is the highest expression of order’. This
assertion, clashing with the bourgeois interpretation of anarchy as chaos, perfectly captured the
theories that were being elaborated by Reclus and other anarchist geographers including Pëtr
Kropotkin (1842-1921). At the centre of these theories lay the conviction that societies organised
around mutual aid and cooperation would be infinitely more rational and empowered than
societies organised under the State and capitalism. Then, militants like Errico Malatesta (1853-
1932) and Luigi Fabbri (1877-1935) advocated the need for formal anarchist organisation - to put
in practice the principles of a horizontal and federalist society in daily life - and prepare the
grounds for revolution. Acknowledging the importance of better understanding the past to inform
the present, this paper first shows the link (generally overlooked by anarchist historiography)
between Reclus’s and Kropotkin’s idea of order and Malatesta’s and Fabbri’s idea of
organisation; then, it presents the model of anarchist organisation as a possible resource for
present-day social movements, which often act as spontaneous networks of activism without a
deep reflexion on organisational issues. According to the tradition of organisational communist
anarchism, represented today by the International of Anarchist Federations, organisation is a key
point, being not only a necessity, but the method for social transformation: without clarity on this,
social struggles are likely to fall either in reformism either in Jacobinism. Finally, I show how
present-day anarchist geographies can contribute to these points through their effort to prefigure
new spaces for new societies.
Keywords: anarchist organisation; mutual aid; anarchist geographies; transnational anarchism;
International of Anarchist Federations
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
‘If it is true that organization creates leaders, if it is true that anarchists are unable to come
together and arrive at an agreement without submitting themselves to an authority, this
means that they are not yet very good anarchists, and before thinking of establishing an
anarchist society within the world they must think of making themselves able to live
anarchistically. The remedy does not lie in the abolition of organization but in the growing
consciousness of each individual member’ (Malatesta, 1897).
Introduction: Activism and (in)formal organisation: re-asserting the ongoing relevance of
anarchist tradition
The paper will explore - and emphasize - the advantages of appealing to ‘order within activism’
from an unexpected radical tradition: anarchism. The uncoupling of order from anarchism has
long been part of wider ignorance, propaganda and common misrepresentations about anarchism
itself. In drawing attention to this misreading of anarchist praxis, and exploring what influential
anarchist thinkers actually said about order, organisation and the question of violence/anti-
violence, then important new insights and implications for an anarchist-inspired contemporary
activism may be brought into being.
In 1851, Elisée Reclus (1830-1905) said that ‘anarchy is the highest expression of order’. This
assertion, clashing with the bourgeois interpretation of anarchy as a synonym of chaos, perfectly
captured the theories that were being elaborated by Reclus and other anarchists of this time,
including Pëtr Kropotkin (1842-1921) and Léon Metchnikoff (1838-1888). At the centre of these
classical anarchist theories lay the conviction that societies organised around mutual aid and
cooperation would be infinitely more rational and empowered than societies organised under the
State and capitalism. It is of great concern therefore to observe how the historical praxis of
anarchism, and the question of ‘order’ is unfamiliar to many scholar-activists discussing the new
tendencies in anarchist movements. Such neglect is particularly worrying in terms of a lost
dialogue with how anarchist views on ‘order’ may influence and inform new approaches to
activism, both in the contemporary period, and in future.
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
Before continuing it is worthwhile offering some contextual reflection on why this uncoupling of
order and anarchism has taken place, as well as confronting the fallacious assumption that the
tradition of so called ‘classical anarchism’ has ended. Witness Castells conjecture that the
sympathies of contemporary anarchists now lean towards ‘loosely organized and largely self-
managed patterns of mobilization and discourse’, because organized anarchism ‘did not survive
the repression it suffered under both capitalism and communism’ (Castells, 2005). Even authors
sympathetic with anarchism have tended to mistakenly define anarchist organisational practices
as essentially lacking - or actively refusing - permanent organisation. Indeed, for some, a
fascination for the idea of ‘dis-organisation’ remains. This can be detected in Ferrell’s (2012), use
of the adjectives ‘anarchic’ and ‘anarchist’, or Curran and Gibson (2013:305), who have sought
to distinguish between different approaches to anarchism, by contrasting ‘“anarchist” from
“anarchical” political praxis’ for example. That is to say, ‘between ideologically motivated, card-
carrying anarchists and anarchical forms of political praxis inspired by anarchist analyses and
principles’ (Gibson, 2013:336). Such distinctions remain deeply problematic, because not only do
they seem to continue identifying anarchism on the grounds of what it is not, but they fail to
advance a discursive space for ‘anarchical’ practices, and how these could inspire a further
momentum for social transformation. However, as this paper seeks to assert, such
pronouncements only hold true if all the organised traditions of anarchism are ignored.
One of my main aims therefore is to demonstrate that the distinctive characteristics of anarchist
organization are not networking, spontaneity, and decentralization (even if decentralization is a
necessary condition). Rather anarchist attitudes toward organisation are still adopted by the
anarchist federations belonging to the International of Anarchist Federations (IFA/IAF)—
drawing on the definition provided by Errico Malatesta, considering organisation as not only a
necessary tool to coordinate collective efforts toward societal transformation, but also a way to
experiment libertarian and egalitarian social relations in daily life in the context of a ‘patient
work’ (Turcato, 2015:128) towards anarchist goals. These traditions - asserting the importance of
order, mutual aid and solidarity within an anarchist society - are still pervasive at the present
moment. In short, a revaluation of historical tendencies in anarchism is long overdue, particularly
in the context of order, activism and organisation.
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
Informal organisation is not – and never has been – a distinctive form of anarchist organisation.
Indeed a fetishisation of informality has been recently contested as a non-libertarian principle by
many anarchist organisations, as will be shown later with reference to the example of the Italian
Anarchist Federation. In this critical appraisal it should also be recognised that that reticular
organisation and informality are often presented as characteristic features of contemporary neo-
liberal economies, where decentralisation also plays a role in flexible capitalist accumulation
(Castells, 2010; Harvey, 1989). In this sense, it has been provocatively suggested that neo-
anarchism and neo-liberalism share many features such as the adoption of horizontal and
decentralised structures (Taylor, 2013:736). It is worth noting that claims for formal anarchist
organisations do not contradict the spontaneous or ‘autonomous, decentralized organization’
(Day, 2005:27) characterising grassroots social movements. Organisational anarchists simply
argue that the best way to engage with these movements and to play a role within them (not a
leading one as in the Leninist idea, but an inspiring one) is having a publically visible and
organised presence in the related social struggles.
This paper is composed of four sections: the first addresses the idea of anarchism as ordered
society according to early anarchist geographers; the second analyses the tradition of
organisational anarchism; the third presents some more recent outcomes of these debates; the
fourth discusses the consistency of present-day anarchist geographies with this tradition and their
insights for present struggles.
1. Recognising the social order of Anarchy
The statement highlighted at the beginning of this paper: ‘Anarchy is the highest expression of
order’1 was written in 1851, in Reclus's first work Le Développement de la liberté dans le monde.
Even though an organised anarchist movement did not exist until the 1870s (when Reclus was
one of its founders), the young Reclus evoked a tradition inspired by both Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon (1809-1865) and his idea of cooperation and solidarity among workers, which was then
called Autogestion (a term which can be roughly translated as ‘self-organisation’) and the 1848 1 Amsterdam, International Institute of Social History, Elisée Reclus Papers, ARCH01170, manuscript Le Développement de la liberté dans le Monde, Montauban, 1851 [published in 1925 by Le Libertaire (28 août-2 oct.)]
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
Revolutions, acknowledged as one of the founding moments for anarchist ideas (Prichard, 2013).
In the 1870s, the idea of anarchist organisation was put into practice in the context of the First
International, after the separation between the General Council led by Marx and Engels, who
sought to centralise the organisation, and the ‘anti-authoritarian’ sections by Switzerland, Spain,
France, Italy, and United States, which met in 1872 in Saint-Imier (Switzerland) to inaugurate the
‘Anti-authoritarian International’ (Guillaume, 1905). In this context, one finds other statements
identifying capitalism—and not anarchy—with themes of disorder. One of these came from the
Geneva militant Charles Perron, cartographer of Reclus’s New Universal Geography (Ferretti,
2014). In a pamphlet written for public education Perron argued: ‘Ignorance, here is the organic
social vice, the foremost cause of disorder! It is here that it is necessary to strike, and strike hard,
because if we can make this cancer disappear, the truth, the final revolution will be
accomplished’ (1868:3). It is worth noting here that Perron, Reclus and Kropotkin, who are not
considered by anarchist historiography as the most animated partisans of organisation, were also
among the protagonists of the first anarchist organisation in history (the Fédération jurassienne).
The Fédération jurassienne directly followed Bakunin’s International Alliance for Socialist
Democracy (Cerrito, 1973:31) in which Reclus also took part (Guillaume, 1905).
On the question of social order, the theory of mutual aid is a clear example of the commitment of
anarchists to identify the grounds upon which anarchist society can work (Gould, 1997). Recent
research has shown that the mutual aid theory, popularised by the famous book by Pyotr
Kropotkin (1902), was the result of a collective elaboration by Reclus, Metchnikoff, and
Kropotkin during their common work in Switzerland between the 1870s and the 1880s (Ferretti,
2011). In Kropotkin’s paper ‘The Coming Anarchy’, which anticipated his later writings on
mutual aid, we find the classical anarchist argument against the commonplace of anarchism as
chaos, stating that the true chaos resides in capitalist society.
‘[It has been said] that whenever there is no government there is disorder; and it implies,
moreover, that order, due to a strong government and a strong police, is always beneficial.
Both implications, however, are anything but proved. There is plenty of order (we should
say, of harmony) in many bunches of human activity where the government, happily, does
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
not interfere . . . As to the proverbial “order” which was once “restored at Warsaw” there
are, I suppose, no two opinions about it’ (Kropotkin, 1887:153).
In this sense, order and social harmony are considered to be built through cooperation; this
implied also a political distance between the theorists of mutual aid and the so-called ‘anarchists-
individualists’ who started to be perceived in the anarchist movement, mainly the French-
speaking one, at the end of the 1880s and definitively in 1892-1894 with the so-called ‘anarchist
bombers’(Maitron, 1975). Many of these individualists denied explicitly the ideas of solidarity
and even the basic principles of association. On the contrary, according to Kropotkin (1887: 157),
within animal to human societies the habits of cooperation
‘are a necessary condition for the welfare of the species in its struggle for life, co-operation
of individuals being a much more important factor in the struggle for the preservation of the
species than the so-much-spoken-of physical struggle between individuals for the means of
existence. The “fittest” in the organic world are those who grow accustomed to life in
society, and life in society necessarily implies moral habits. As to mankind, it has, during
its long existence, developed in its midst a nucleus of social habits, of moral habits, which
cannot disappear as long as human societies exist’
Another political implication of the idea of mutual aid was the belief in evolution as one of the
processes which would help encourage societies to move toward more libertarian and egalitarian
horizons, expressed in texts such as Evolution et Révolution by Reclus (1891) and ‘Revolution
and Evolution’ by Metchnikoff. This also meant that anarchist revolution didn’t draw on a unique
(Jacobin) violent clash breaking the bourgeois society, but on progressive and gradual liberation
processes based on increasing individual and collective consciousness. In his paper, published in
the Contemporary Review, Metchnikoff—dissatisfied by the narrow definitions of sociology
given by both August Comte and Herbert Spencer—insisted that the premises of social
cooperation were observable both in the early human societies and in the groups of animals.
‘Natural science teaches us that association is the law of every existence. What we call society in
common speech is only a particular case of that general law’ (Metchnikoff, 1886:415). This
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
theory could accommodate Darwinian evolutionism while at the same time asserting cooperation
(rather than competition) as the main factor of evolution in human societies. In his main work, La
civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques, Metchnikoff argued that the highest level of social
evolution would be a society where cooperation is not imposed, but applied spontaneously in
every aspect of social life, that is, the anarchist society. ‘So, the sociological progress is in
inverse relation to the degree of coercion, constriction and authority deployed, and in direct
relation to the role of will, freedom, anarchy’ (Metchnikoff, 1889:89).
Metchnikoff is also a little-known figure among anarchists, but his research was very important
to Reclus and Kropotkin, and his works, circulating among the anarchist militants of that time,
influenced some of their conceptions. In a letter to Fabbri, Malatesta endorsed La civilisation et
les grands fleuves historiques, indicating that, even though he didn’t personally know
Metchnikoff, ‘I read the book at the request of Kropotkin, later I read it again and always found it
most interesting’.2 This document is important because, even though traditional anarchist
historiography has seen some opposition between the ‘educationism’ of Reclus and Kropotkin
and the revolutionary ‘voluntarism’ of Malatesta (Berti, 2003), it should be noted that, in the
spaces between these two interpretations, there are more points in common than generally
considered, particularly regarding their shared challenge to the aforementioned uncoupling of
anarchy and order.
2. Struggling against ‘bourgeois influences’: Errico Malatesta and Luigi Fabbri
Errico Malatesta, one of the most famous anarchists of his time, criticised Kropotkin’s idea of
anarchy as a science, considering that it could lead towards an excessive fatalism and stating the
necessity to focus more on the action’s practical needs than on theory. Malatesta’s method was
then deemed a voluntarist one: this means that anarchists need to do a long and ‘patient work’ to
put the bases for a future social revolution (Turcato, 2015:128). Nevertheless, there was a clear
continuity between the ‘educationism’ by Reclus and Kropotkin and the ‘voluntarism’ by
Malatesta and his closest friend and collaborator, Luigi Fabbri, the latter strongly committed to
2 IISH, Luigi Fabbri Papers, 112, E. Malatesta to Luigi Fabbri, 7 November 1927.
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
the political and scientific work by Reclus. In particular, if the anarchists inspired by Malatesta
considered the ideas of education and evolution not enough for the final revolutionary outcome,
nonetheless they did not deny their importance for social transformation. It is worth noting that
radicalizing pedagogy is one of the challenges for today social movements and an object of recent
contributions from anarchist geographies (see Springer et al., 2016).
Malatesta and Fabbri were both exponents of the anarchist transnational networks, which are
increasingly interesting to present-day scholarship as a characteristic of historical anarchism
(Bantman and Altena, 2015; Hirsch and Van Der Walt, 2010). As shown by Davide Turcato
(2007), Italian/speaking militants played a very important role in these networks, mainly because
they, more than others, circulated throughout the world as political exiles, economic migrants, or
committed international propagandists. One of the hubs of transnational anarchist communities of
exiles and migrants at the time was the city of London, where both Malatesta and Kropotkin lived
for many years. There, Malatesta started his struggle for organizing anarchists with the clear aim
to one day bring this organisation to Italy, when the movement was then harshly repressed by the
government. According to Pietro Di Paola, these efforts took place around periodicals such as
L’Associazione. ‘Its political aims were ambitious: the reorganisation of the anarchist movement
and the constitution of an international socialist-anarchist revolutionary party with a common
platform; a party whose unity and discipline derived not from leaders or official deliberations but
from co-operative action, consciousness and the sharing of means and ends’ (Di Paola, 2013:79).
According to Malatesta, the lack of formal organisation which characterized the anarchist
movement in the 1880s and 1890s was not the result of a conscious strategy as believed even by
many anarchists, but the (evil) result of the dissolution of the First International, which had lost
its contacts with workers. Nevertheless, Malatesta deemed organisation a strategic point for
anarchism. ‘Organization which is, after all, only the practice of cooperation and solidarity, is a
natural and necessary condition of social life; it is an inescapable fact which forces itself on
everybody, as much on human society in general as on any group of people who are working
towards a common objective’ (Malatesta, 1897).
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
In this context, organisation is presented as a necessity for social struggle and social
transformation. ‘The age-long oppression of the masses by a small privileged group has always
been the result of the inability of the oppressed to agree among themselves to organize with
others for production, for enjoyment and for the possible needs of defence against whoever might
wish to exploit and oppress them. Anarchism exists to remedy this state of affairs’ (Malatesta,
1897). However, organisation is also the condition to build in present society embryos of the
future one and to guarantee to all associated the equality and freedom which disorganisation and
informality are not able to grant. The basis of the proposed anarchist organisation was federalism.
This followed the federalist tradition of anarchism by Proudhon, Bakunin, and Reclus, as well as
the example of the Anti-authoritarian Federation’s sections.
‘The groups, the federation of groups, the federations of federations, meetings, congresses,
correspondence committees and so on. But this also must be done freely, in such a way as
not to restrict the thought and the initiative of individual members, … for an anarchist
organization, congresses—in spite of all the disadvantages from which they suffer as
representative bodies—are free from authoritarianism in any shape or form because they do
not legislate and do not impose their deliberations on others’ (Malatesta, 1897).
Working groups such as the commission of correspondence should be devoid of directive powers
but should only work as technical supports, building organisational practices in coherence with
the kind of society that anarchists want to build. The coherence between means and ends was
always one of Malatesta’s key points; in this sense, anarchists shouldn’t lead, but advice: ‘We
anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.
We do not believe in the good that comes from above and imposed by force’ (Malatesta, 1897).
According to Malatesta, where individuals and groups are not organised with assemblies and
formal mandates, mechanisms of power are necessarily reproduced within disorganisation and
informality. Malatesta used the example of some militant journals ‘whose pages are closed to all
whose ideas, style or simply person have the misfortune to be unwelcome in the eyes of the
editors…. The situation would be different if these newspapers belonged to all, instead of being
the personal property of this or that individual’ (Malatesta, 1907). In his critique of dis-
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
organisation, Malatesta argued that power can be reproduced in a wide range of ways at the
micro-scale, as Michel Foucault similarly argued much later: on this point, Brian Morris (2014)
has recently shown how mainstream poststructuralist critiques of power generally lack originality
if compared to the rich (and neglected) anarchist tradition I am addressing here.
Malatesta’s efforts were supported by Luigi Fabbri, the protagonist of the federation process by
Italian anarchists started in 1904 in the region of Rome and leading to the constitution, in 1920,
of the Italian Anarchist Union (Unione Anarchica Italiana — UAI). This process was defined as a
‘struggle’ because the aggressive opposition that it found by anti-organisational militants and
individualists. Individualism reached strength and notoriety due to the French bombings of 1892-
1894 and also owed to the introduction in the anarchist field of amoral and antisocial tendencies
inspired by authors such as Stirner and Nietzsche, considered by social anarchists as extraneous
to the movements’ roots, and philosophically strongly challenged by Kropotkin (Kinna, 2016).
Fig. 1 – Errico Malatesta (1853-1932)
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
Organisation and anti-violence
So, the struggle for organisation was also the struggle against individualists and ‘bombists’, who
did everything they could to boycott this work. This included shooting Malatesta in 1899 during a
meeting, which only wounded the Italian anarchist (Turcato, 2015:190). In Malatesta’s
biography, Fabbri argued that having fought, and finally won, this battle for persuading
anarchists to organize themselves (strictly linked to his critique of revolutionary violence as I
explain below) was one of the best reasons for the elderly Malatesta to be proud. In this book,
Fabbri argued that if anarchism starts from the rights of the individual, a declared ‘individualism’
was relatively late in anarchist tradition. ‘It appeared around 1890; before, there were only anti-
organisational tendencies, among which gradually emerged explicit individualist tendencies’
(Fabbri, 1951:177). Thus, Fabbri argued that to get organisation it was necessary to contrast the
individualistic tendencies, which he considered as bourgeois influences on anarchism. Trained in
a humanistic and solidarist culture, Fabbri couldn’t conceive of the violent propaganda of some
individualists practicing ‘egoism, theft . . . hate and disdain for losers’ (Ibid.:178). Fabbri’s
argument was that this did not belong to anarchist principles, but that ‘many people accepted as
anarchist ideas all or a great deal of what the bourgeois invented against anarchism’
(Manfredonia, 1998:XIII), that is to say, ‘bourgeoisie exercised an extraordinary influence on
anarchism, when it assumed the task to do anarchist propaganda’ (Fabbri, 1998:19). The
implication here is that when people read in the mainstream press that anarchists were amoral,
violent, and opposed to organization, those who had these characteristics began to consider
themselves as anarchists. In bourgeois milieus, there was also some aesthetic praising of the
indiscriminate dynamite attacks of 1892-1894, as ‘artists and dandies sympathised for the
bombers’ (Manfredonia, 1998:XI). Thus, according to Fabbri, ‘bourgeois literature, which found
in anarchism a pretext for violent aesthetics, contributed to diffuse among some anarchists an
individualist and anti-social mentality’ (Fabbri, 1998:16). On an amusing note, Fabbri recalled
his own experiences as a political prisoner in Southern Italy, where some prisoners associated
with the Mafia cheered anarchists who were detained, believing that Anarchy was the name of a
powerful criminal organisation, thus ‘worthy to be allied with their Honoured Society’ (Ibid.:21).
Fabbri shared Malatesta’s critique of violence as a revolutionary means. This didn’t imply an
absolute non-violence, because defensive violence was considered a last resort in case of
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
repression, then applied by Italian anarchists, for instance in the resistance against fascism (Rossi,
2011). Nevertheless, they deemed violence the contrary of anarchy, which means ‘love’ (Fabbri,
1998:49). Consequently, ‘violence must be used the least possible, and in any case only as a
defensive resort, never as an offensive’ (Ibid.:52). In this sense, Fabbri’s critique concerned as
well the verbal violence of some journals aiming to ‘scare the bourgeois’, promising flames,
death, and dynamite, a language which he considered as useless and misleading.
The direct opposition between the couple of individualism and violence, and the ideas of
organisation and solidarity appears clearly in what has been called ‘a gradualist view of anarchy;
the more people will embrace that sentiment and that value, the more broadly anarchy will be
realized’ (Turcato, 2014:3). According to Malatesta and Fabbri, partial conquests in social
struggles, like those obtained by trade-unionism, didn’t imply the forgetting of the final
revolution as other anarchists stated, but could be useful as revolutionary training, if done with
libertarian methods. This seems not so far from Reclus’s idea that evolution and revolution are
not contrasting terms, but two different speeds in the same social process (Reclus, 1891); it is
also worth noting that Fabbri, and his daughter Luce (1908-2000), were the most important
Italian translators and scholars of Reclus in the first half of the 20th century (Ferretti, 2016).
Through Il Pensiero, Fabbri published his reports on ‘Anarchist organisation’ (L’organizzazione
anarchica) and ‘Workers’ organisation and anarchy’ (L’organizzazione operaia e l’anarchia)
which he presented in the 1907 anarchist international congress in Amsterdam, when the issues of
anarchist organisation and its links with revolutionary syndicalism were debated. Even though the
practical proposals of the participants were different, what stood clear in this congress were the
links between social anarchism, workers’ struggles, and organisational issues. According to
Fabbri, the individualism attributed to anarchism by its enemies contributed to lead some
anarchists ‘to deny the socialist principle of anarchism’ (Fabbri, 1975:2). It was the occasion to
state which organisation models anarchists should avoid, namely those of ‘both Catholic church
and Marxist church’ (Ibid.: 3). In his report on anarchist organisation, Fabbri presented it as a
strategic and central principle. ‘One says that organisation is a mean and not an end; this is a
mistake . . . the principle of organisation is one of the basic foundations of anarchist thought’
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
(Fabbri, 1907: 3). Thus, organisation was not a mere practical option, but the necessary method to
apply for being all free and equal, experimenting new social relationships in daily life, and
putting theory into practice. Fabbri presented it, ironically, as a specific form of ‘propaganda by
the deed’. ‘As the best propaganda is done by the example, we try to organise ourselves, to build
groups, to federate them . . . doing thus propaganda by the deed’ (Ibid.:4, 6).
Fig. 2 – Fabbri, 1907
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
Fabbri’s main argument was that the alternatives to formal organisation led to authoritarian
developments, because even in a hypothetical future freed society, ‘without anarchist
organisational tools, the risk is that necessity leads people to re-adopt the authoritarian ones’
(Ibid.:12). Fabbri argued that non-organised anarchists were ‘those who are organised without
knowing it and believe to be more autonomous than others’ (Ibid.:19), because in informality and
dis-organisation a most clever and prestigious person (or group) can centralise things performing
an invisible organisation in which militants ‘are unconsciously organised by the speaker, by the
agitator or by the journal’ (Ibid.:19). On the contrary, if they are formally organised, ‘they can
oppose a better resistance to the influence of the comrades more intelligent, more clever, more
active’ (Ibid.:20). Finally, if a formalized anarchist organisation was not possible, ‘then it would
be impossible to realize anarchy’ (Ibid.:29).
It is worth stressing that Fabbri, at the end of his report, acknowledged the importance of
Kropotkin and Reclus in establishing the principle of cooperation, association and mutual aid as a
basis of his own organisational anarchism.
‘Elie Reclus [Elisée’s brother] found among the “primitives” several examples of
libertarian groups, even if they don’t live in full anarchy; Pyotr Kropotkin studied
libertarian associations among animals, among “primitives”, among the artisans in the
medieval communes. Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus show how, also in present society, there
are strong tendencies towards communism and anarchy, by presenting numerous examples
of commercial, industrial, beneficence, scientific or artistic associations which are anarchist
in their internal organisation, even if they have no anarchist aims. If this possibility is
acknowledged for non-anarchist individuals, associated for bourgeois ends, why should we
deny the possibility for us to be associated on libertarian bases?’ (Ibid:31-32).
All along the 20th century, authors like Fabbri and Malatesta were most influential in debates on
anarchist organisation, which took place during the antifascist resistance and within the anarchist
federations constituted in its aftermath, founding the IAF/IFA in a very significant date, 1968.
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
3. Synthesis, informalism and international federation processes
Anarchist organisation is strictly linked to the idea of federalism and strongly based on territorial
groups and federations, without the need for recognizing political and administrative boundaries.
A key example is the Spanish Movimento Libertario, whose biggest components—the National
Work Confederation (CNT) and the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI)—realized, during the
Spanish war of 1936-1939, a social revolution in regions such as Catalonia and Aragon which put
into practice the anarchist geographers’ ideas of decentralism as showed by Myrna Breitbart
(1978). The basic forms of social life, in these communities, corresponded to the organisational
scales of workers’ unions and anarchist groups, established by the declaration of anarchist
communism (Comunismo libertario) approved by the 1936 CNT Congress held in Zaragoza:
‘The individual, the group, the federation’ (Peirats 1951). This was clearly consistent with the
traditional formula endorsed by Fabbri: ‘Free individual in the group, free group in the
federation, free federation in the International, as one said since Bakunin’s times’ (Fabbri,
1951:205). This also recalls Simon Springer’s statement that ‘scale is not synonymous with
hierarchy’ (Springer, 2014:410) as the geographical patterns of Spanish collectivization assumed
clearly different levels of scale in the organization of production and consumption, without a
subordination of the local levels to the central ones (Breitbart, 1978).
After the storms of Fascism, Stalinism, and the Second World War, which devastated the
European anarchist movements, one of the most interesting experiences in post-war re-
organisation was the Italian Anarchist Federation (Federazione Anarchica Italiana - FAI), direct
heir of the UAI. Founded in Carrara in 1945 after a strong commitment by its militants in partisan
resistance all over Italy (Rossi, 1981), the FAI adopted the Anarchist Program by Errico
Malatesta and a Pact of Alliance on the model of the UAI. Its organisational principle is called
the ‘synthesis’, referring to a debate which took place in the inter-war period among French and
exiled Russian and Italian anarchists on the Platform of organisation proposed by the Ukrainian
militants Pyotr Archinov and Nestor Makhno. They argued, after their defeat by the Bolsheviks
in Russia, that anarchists should adopt a more centralised organisation to be more efficient in the
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
moment of hard struggles. The majority of international (and organisational) anarchists, including
Fabbri and Malatesta, refused this proposal. According to Fabbri, the principle of anarchist
organisation should be ‘an inclusive and not excluding one’ (Cerrito, 1973:316). In this sense, he
stressed that in the UAI, the cooperation between different tendencies, in particular between
different approaches to revolutionary syndicalism, was allowed by the principle of the ‘synthesis’
(Ibid.:319). This means that different theoretical positions could co-exist in an anarchist
federation, when the basic operational aims (in the case of 1920 UAI, making the revolution as
soon as possible) were shared. This also implies that decision making is not based on the
principle of majority, and not even necessarily on that of unanimity; the key idea is that an
eventual majority should not have powers for compelling the minority to accept its deliberations,
thus every decision only engages those who freely adopt it. Malatesta criticised the Platform for
its proposal to institute an executive committee (and not a simple commission of correspondence
devoid of executive powers) and to adopt the principle of majority, arguing that ‘Anarchists do
not admit the power of majority, called democracy, as they do not admit the power of some,
called aristocracy, or the power of one, called autocracy’ (Ibid.:333). As a result, the ‘synthesis’
has become the general definition of the organisations inspired by Malatesta’s work.
An important FAI’s outcome was its initiative towards an International of Anarchist Federations,
finally constituted in the 1968 international anarchist congress held in Carrara (Zani, 2008). The
IAF/IFA includes today federations in different continents. Its Commission of Correspondence
was entrusted, for the first years, to the prestigious Italian (transnational) militant Umberto
Marzocchi (1900-1986), inspired as well by Malatesta and Fabbri (Sacchetti, 2005).
Some events from the Italian political life of the past 10-15 years highlight the difference
between this kind of anarchist organisation and more informal approaches. In the 1990s, some
exponents of the area called ‘anarchist-insurrectionist’, a network violently opposed to all that is
communist, social, and organised in anarchism, started to talk about an ‘informal organisation’.
In December 2003, a rudimentary bomb was sent in a post packet addressed to the house of
politician Romano Prodi, then president of the European Commission, in Bologna, and exploded
without injuring anyone. Nevertheless, the event had a huge echo, and a claim of responsibility,
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
re-launched by all national and international medias, was signed by one Informal Anarchist
Federation (Federazione Anarchica Informale – FAI), a phantom organisation which took
provocatively the acronym of the Federazione Anarchica Italiana – FAI. This created not only
confusion about the public image of anarchism in Italy, but also risked exposure of well-known
militants belonging to groups doing public activities under the acronym FAI. The Italian
Anarchist Federation thus had to respond publicly. The task of speaking with national press is
generally committed to the Commission of Correspondence (which was then entrusted to the
Federation of Reggio Emilia) whose members at that time wrote a public note, mentioned by
several national newspapers that also interviewed them. This text is critical to understanding the
evils of informalism for anarchist organisation and the persistent links between organisational
issues and the problem of violence. In the following days similar packets arrived at public offices,
the bombs sometimes wounding ordinary people (including porters and secretaries) and thus
instigating the random violence against which social anarchists have raged since the 19th century.
It is also worth noting that the real existence of this ‘informal federation’ was never proved, thus
the suspicion that all this could have been a provocation by some police or institution is still
considered a possibility among militants.
The CdC (Commission of Correspondence) stated then: ‘1. We denounce the infamous fact of
attributing this act to an acronym which alludes to the FAI - Federazione Anarchica Italiana: the
one who calls the attention of state’s repression on a group of comrades is a policeman or his
collaborator; 2. We confirm the tradition of anarchist organization as configured in the 1872
Saint-Imier Congress and in the deliberations by the UAI in 1920 and the FAI in 1945: our
organization has nothing to do with informality, because for us the clearness and collectiveness of
mandates are the only guarantee to make decisions according to an anarchist method; 3. We
reiterate our condemnation of bombs, bomb-packets and all devices which can strike randomly
and serve, by way of consequence, the logics of provocation and criminalization of dissent in a
period when the anarchists are among the protagonists of social struggles, strikes and anti-war
initiatives; 4. We confirm that the struggles of the women and men participating in our federation
are publically deployed in manifestations, in our engagement for autonomous syndicalism, in
grassroots movements, in the anarchist clubs that we opened publically in dozens of cities, in our
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
open opposition to the logics of domination and to all state’s terrorisms, and in our commitment
to build a society of equality and freedom’ (CdC-FAI, 2003). The CdC text was endorsed, a few
weeks later, by the FAI national assembly, which published a longer document along the same
lines, with the ironic title ‘Anarchy is a priority, albeit not by mail’ (L’anarchia é prioritaria, ma
non si fa per posta) (Il convegno nazionale, 2004).
Toward an anarchist organization of society and space? A focus on Anarchist Geography
The main contribution of this paper within this Special Issue is to emphasise that the idea of a
public and formalized anarchist organisation is highly consistent with the claims of key
anarchists. Indeed its success enables the very possibility of an ordered anarchist society (which
itself demands understanding as a highly geographical phenomenon). Thus - both historically and
in the present moment - questions relating to the prefigurative spatial and territorial politics (and
praxis) of anarchist individuals, groups and federations are central issues among anarchist
organizers. I have argued that the question of formal organisation is a central one for anarchism
and for its spatiality, and that it is consistent with Reclus’s and Kropotkin’s original idea of
anarchism as social order. To understand the role played by spaces and places for anarchist
organisation, it is worth considering not only the tradition of early anarchist geographers, but also
the present literature rediscovering anarchist geographies. Springer argues that ‘recognizing
specific contexts of public space requires understanding that any social organization is both the
outcome of the “local” politics of the street and their relational geographies to the wider power
geometries of “global” space’ (Springer, 2011: 541). Spaces and social organisation are linked to
the opposition of a central authority principle, as exposed by Springer, who argues that
‘anarchism opposes all systems of rule or forms of -archy (i.e. hierarchy, patriarchy, monarchy,
oligarchy, anthroparchy, etc.) and is instead premised upon co-operative and egalitarian forms of
social, political, and economic organization, where ever-evolving and autonomous spatialities
may flourish’ (Springer, 2012: 1606). Decentralisation, according to Springer, ‘has been at the
heart of radical geographical ideas for a very long time’ (Springer, 2014: 405). Another important
point in common between anarchist geographies and anarchist organizational practices is the idea
of place-based prefigurative politics: according to Anthony Ince (2012: 162), ‘rather than
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
believing that it is possible to use authoritarian or undemocratic means to create a free and equal
society, anarchists have developed ways of embedding the political principles of an envisioned
anarchist society into the ways they organise in the here-and-now . . . such as co-operative
cultural and productive enterprises, libertarian schooling and member-run anarchist unions and
tenants’ groups’.
This idea of anarchy as a condition for free organisation without state and coercion was then
stated on geographical bases. Reclus and Metchnikoff, for instance, addressed the history of the
‘fluvial civilisation’ of the Nile basin, arguing that only a dense and well-organized population
could realize the managing of canals and floods. Metchnikoff, quoting the correspondent
passages of Reclus’s New Universal Geography, argued that the strong association needed to
maintain channels, to periodically clear lands, and to seed after every flood could either be
imposed upon individuals or freely adopted by association; human societies were before their
first choices between anarchy and despotism. ‘Either be all associated and equal in right, either be
all the slaves of a master’ (Metchnikoff, 1889: 227).
The argument by Kropotkin and Reclus that mutual aid is already present in many parts of
capitalist society has been rescued and developed from the standpoint of
economic geography, addressing ‘the complex and multiple ways in which people in the
“advanced economies” organise themselves to undertake regular material and social tasks’
(White, 2009: 469). According to White and Colin Williams (2012: 1627), ‘many of these
practices are ideologically orientated toward anarchist-based visions of work and organization’.
Thus, the idea of social organisation as a possible basis for more conscious political outcomes is
still debated in recent literature on geography and anarchism. As Colin Ward stated, referring to
the anarchist tradition, ‘an anarchist society, which organises itself without authority, is always in
existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy,
capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties,
relations differences and their superstitious separatism’ (Ward, 1982: 14).
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
Conclusion
The question of anarchist organisation invites a complex response. Anarchism is firstly an
attempt to build a libertarian and egalitarian society through the daily application of methods of
freedom and equality, one that emphasises coherence between means and ends (Turcato, 2015).
Before present-day neoliberalism, the specificity of anarchist organisation is not its reticular
nature, which is agreed upon by mainstream organizations (Castells, 2010; Harvey, 1989), but its
challenge is to be - as Malatesta stated - an organisation whose method is to guarantee its
members freedom and equality in order to transform society. The shortcomings of the faith in
networks, cybernetics, and self-organisation have been underscored by John Duda, who argues
that ‘the unquestioned belief, tragically too often demonstrated by contemporary anarchist
movements, in the power and efficacy of self-organised social movements to transform the world
on their own terms perhaps as owes more than we might realise to a kind of borrowed faith in
scientific objectivity and technological progress, rooted in the theory of complex cybernetic
systems’ (Duda, 2013:70). If anarchism acknowledges mass action’s spontaneity, informality and
spontaneity have never been an adequate definition to portray the specificity of anarchist
organisation. Thus, I would argue that neglected ‘classical anarchism’ brings in its tradition
positive definitions of what anarchism proposes and suggestions about how anarchists should be
organised, and that present scholars and militants addressing these topics should engage more
with this tradition.
Contrary to the commonplaces dissociating ‘order’ and ‘anarchism’, organisation is intended, in
anarchist tradition, not as a merely practical option, but as the necessary method to experiment
new social relationships in daily life and to guarantee the aforementioned coherence of means
and ends. This has valuable implications for how we think about organisation and activism at the
present moment. There is today, in social movements, a lack of reflection on organization:
without pretending to present these principles as the sole possible model, this paper aims to call
militants’ attention on the importance of the transparency of mandates in order to guarantee
equality in decision making and to avoid the formation of new opportunistic leaderships, and at
“Organisation and formal activism: insights from the anarchist tradition”, International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 36, n. 11-12 (2006) [special number “Protest and activism (with)out organisation”, edited by P. Wood and R. White], http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IJSSP-11-2015-0127
the same time to practice new relations in daily struggles foreseeing the new society that these
movements aim to build.
Finally, this paper has shown the role of early anarchist geographers in inspiring the concept of
anarchist organisation. To understand what is called now ‘prefigurative politics’, coming back to
the works of Reclus, Kropotkin, Fabbri, and Malatesta offers valuable insights. Their anarchist
praxis can contribute much to the urgent task of creating new prefigurative anarchist geographies
in the present. As Ince (2012; 1653) argues: ‘Through an emphasis on the prefigurative, it may be
possible to embed within territorial practices certain organisational functions and structures that
are at once effective in building spaces of struggle and developing modes of organisation that
prefigure future worlds’. Finding new ways, adapted to changing realities, to shift from organised
activism to the active prefiguration of new spaces and new societies is an open challenge both for
anarchist/critical scholarship and for grassroots movements.
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